Consolidated list of improvements and feature requests

Comments

A suggestion for you -- how about transposing your list into a searchable document?

Please see attached example

Hi @dave3 - in general the approach over the last 5 years has been to keep the lists as something simple within the limitations of the forum system rather than putting it in some external system or document format type. That comes with benefit that the content integrates directly with the forum and is relatively easily found and read, but with the short comings of limited formatting and other features. There is limited discussion now that occurs directly in these threads so another approach would be to close or rework them such that the lists each stand as a single post on a closed topic (like the top tips posts that came along later in the old forum system). That single post can then be found within the forum system reasonably easily/consistently (and could be improved if there were a getting started like sticky post or block on the main page that also referenced the terms and conditions and community guidelines) and the individual post can be searched in the browser (as it can now but without that search then also ranging over the first 20 or so posts that appear on the first page).

Perhaps rather naively with hindsight, when I started the lists I never expected them to get so long and for the proportion of unimplemented ideas to be so high. Not much though gets added to the lists now as the number of completely new ideas is very low and much of the lists formed within the first year. One might wonder exactly how YouView refer to this list, what their own internal list/roadmap looks like, and thus their private/internal assessment of the ideas and the likelihood they might implement more in the future. That of course is not something that they as a commercial company would disclose here (or in fact most likely anywhere outside of their own employees), and the community terms of use (point 17) also steer us away from such speculation.

For now though the lists continue to stand as a reasonably good record linking in to the various specific topics that raised the ideas and bugs which many people do seem to find and thus get a quick overview (or in some cases then follow up and read through in more detail or explore a particular idea topic in more detail) that most ideas are well trodden ground that have been well discussed, that YouView are well aware of them and welcome the feedback, but that YouView will of course largely steer the development as they see most appropriate. Potentially other competing products may be aware of the info too and could use it as one of many tools in considering how to develop their own system to compete with and outperform YouView, which would be healthy competition at work

Please see
below my thoughts / ideas on this. These are still in the embryo stage:-

As a newbie –
I felt that I kept stepping into bear traps (some of the time, I personally wasn’t in a
good place so that didn’t help), but I think there’s room to provide
more signposts to allow a better understand of how to use the community
forum. - i.e. a “getting started / welcome pack” which newbies are directed to /sent to
their email address etc., but it must also be persistence - on the front page - you
can only search for things if you know they exist

The document
created by Sarah about using the new forum – should be matured into a full
blown users guide – Perhaps owned / maintained by the community super-users - thus negating any commercial considerations

Like you’ve
stated it should cover things such as:-

Links
to other documents – (the ownership of these could be a mixture of either
Youview or the community) - Code of conduct, Maintenance mode instructions,
the role of the super-users, lists of known requirements and known
problems/ bugs as identified by the community, etc

Explain
Technical limitation of Youview vers broadcaster - CRID etc. one of the points I got totally
confused over

Tips / Instructions such as “before
posting please check the lists of known problems and known requirements -
although that could be added to the posting screen

etc

-
but the welcome document must be persistence and some of the other documents
searchable – Expecting a user to type in EPG or App in the current search facility
and wade through the results to see if their point has been covered is
unrealistic or have I missed something?

Searchable
documents – rather than going external to a PDF etc, it would be much better if
that was a facility provided within the forum, It would enable a search of the list of requirements for all items relating to EPG or App etc. – is that a new requirement for the Youview
team?

The
thing that’s also missing is the ability to add “me too” to each of the individual
requirements / problems. Whilst it’s not
going to sway Youview for me it would provide a coat peg to hang that
particular grievance on.

Personally
I think the list of requirements will grow, but for that to happen it needs to
be better signposted.

Please see
below my thoughts / ideas on this. These are still in the embryo stage:-

As a newbie –
I felt that I kept stepping into bear traps (some of the time, I personally wasn’t in a
good place so that didn’t help), but I think there’s room to provide
more signposts to allow a better understand of how to use the community
forum. - i.e. a “getting started / welcome pack” which newbies are directed to /sent to
their email address etc., but it must also be persistence - on the front page - you
can only search for things if you know they exist

The document
created by Sarah about using the new forum – should be matured into a full
blown users guide – Perhaps owned / maintained by the community super-users - thus negating any commercial considerations

Like you’ve
stated it should cover things such as:-

Links
to other documents – (the ownership of these could be a mixture of either
Youview or the community) - Code of conduct, Maintenance mode instructions,
the role of the super-users, lists of known requirements and known
problems/ bugs as identified by the community, etc

Explain
Technical limitation of Youview vers broadcaster - CRID etc. one of the points I got totally
confused over

Tips / Instructions such as “before
posting please check the lists of known problems and known requirements -
although that could be added to the posting screen

etc

-
but the welcome document must be persistence and some of the other documents
searchable – Expecting a user to type in EPG or App in the current search facility
and wade through the results to see if their point has been covered is
unrealistic or have I missed something?

Searchable
documents – rather than going external to a PDF etc, it would be much better if
that was a facility provided within the forum, It would enable a search of the list of requirements for all items relating to EPG or App etc. – is that a new requirement for the Youview
team?

The
thing that’s also missing is the ability to add “me too” to each of the individual
requirements / problems. Whilst it’s not
going to sway Youview for me it would provide a coat peg to hang that
particular grievance on.

Personally
I think the list of requirements will grow, but for that to happen it needs to
be better signposted.

Much of what you suggest existed on the old GetSat based forum (although that of course had numerous other issues), although some had not been so heavily used in the more recent years. Before that forum opened YouView asked me to seed it with some initial topics, plus I added several more after launch, that included some relating to boot strapping new arrivals:

A further key was then the first of these documents was tied into a very visible welcome block that persisted near the top of the community home page (along with the terms of use and community guidelines plus a short bit of welcome text).

Such a block does not (yet?) exist on this new forum system. If it did then it would make it worthwhile investing some time in updated such old topics or creating new ones to give those initial welcoming and helpful tips

@Sarah, perhaps you and YouView could give some fresh thought to tweaking the site structure to provide another block near the top of the community home, e.g. above the categories box, within which it could include something similar to the old welcome text, links to the terms of use and community guidelines, plus a getting started link. That getting start link can then be a topic YouView (or I) maintain that has a short list of other helpful links to reference topics such as the lists, forum tips etc

Anaglypta - I mostly use my mini IPad - to the point where I've forgotten some std. window's features.

I didn't know how to do word search on my IPad, but have found this on the net which might be old hat to most on here.

Using the built in Safari "Find in Page feature".

In Safari to perform a search for words on the current page, tap the address bar and type in your search. Under the heading "On This Page", tap "find .........." . It's at the bottom of the list, if you don’t see this option, scroll down — it may be obscured by the on-screen keyboard.

Also at the top of the page on *some sites they have an extra black line, which has a built in search function, this is a lot more intuitive than the above method.

Anaglypta - I mostly use my mini IPad - to the point where I've forgotten some std. window's features.

I didn't know how to do word search on my IPad, but have found this on the net which might be old hat to most on here.

Using the built in Safari "Find in Page feature".

In Safari to perform a search for words on the current page, tap the address bar and type in your search. Under the heading "On This Page", tap "find .........." . It's at the bottom of the list, if you don’t see this option, scroll down — it may be obscured by the on-screen keyboard.

Also at the top of the page on *some sites they have an extra black line, which has a built in search function, this is a lot more intuitive than the above method.

*probably just Apple sites

Trouble is, Find in Page <> Find in Thread for multi-page threads.

Though at least we don’t have the folding issue that GetSat had, where Comments could be folded under, so you couldn’t even find things that were on the same page, unless you expanded all the folding first.

But a good, if perhaps little-known feature of Vanilla (and a prime candidate for the missing ‘How To...s’ on the missing ‘New Users Start Here’ thread) is the little arrow you see on the right of the Search Bar.

Tap/click this, and a whole new set of filters will appear in the resulting Advanced Search.

‘Does television exist for us to watch, or do we exist to watch television?’ - Noah Hawley

Initial impression - It feels like a tool for those who know what their looking for and I think it would be hard work for newbies to use as a research tool. Perhaps a write up stating intended use might put me right.

Initial impression - It feels like a tool for those who know what their looking for and I think it would be hard work for newbies to use as a research tool. Perhaps a write up stating intended use might put me right.

I think there is a problem with the Title search in that it only searches the actual Title (first) postings, and not the whole of the matching threads.

So your first search assembled all the opening postings (only) from threads with BT in the Title, and then filtered these to show just the ones that contained EPG.

And your second search assembled all the opening postings (only) from threads with EPG in the Title, and then filtered these to show just the ones that contained BT.

Hence the different results.

Perhaps the problem is just with my understanding, though.

The Author box shows a considerable reluctance to work at all on my iPad, but I do recall it is a bit reluctant to bring up single names even on my laptop, seemingly preferring the (alleged illegal) ones with spaces in, of which there seem to be a surprising number.

Try putting the name you want in, and then backspacing a couple of characters - surprisingly, this often makes them appear

‘Does television exist for us to watch, or do we exist to watch television?’ - Noah Hawley

Can I please request a discrete button press to launch each inbuilt App? For example, the USB keyboard has several spare keys that are currently not assigned to anything. It would be great if these could be assigned to launch iPlayer, ITV Hub etc.